Serena Software Ships First Portfolio Management Solution to Integrate Software Development Data

“Finally, with Serena Mariner, IT executives have the tools they need to quantify and justify their application development efforts,” said Jeremy Burton, Serena president and CEO. “Up to now, IT managers have been forced to make critical decisions with insufficient data. With Serena’s integrated PPM/ALM solution, CIOs have the same level of visibility that line of business managers have for their operations. They can drill down on current project metrics and communicate IT’s value back to the business.”

Today’s enterprises face competitive pressures that challenge them to deliver high-quality software that cuts costs and drives business revenue. Yet demand for new or enhanced applications far outstrips IT resources. Serena’s ALM solutions now provide visibility, automation, and collaboration across the application lifecycle to reveal the true cost of maintaining existing applications and ensure that the highest value projects are properly resourced.

According to an independent report by Forrester, “ALM alone is not enough to guarantee successful software delivery. Much of ALM’s value comes from its connections to the separate but related disciplines of Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and IT operations. The best PPM efforts leverage ALM data to inform executive decision-making. And hand-offs to and from IT operations fulfill, propel, and inform development activities.”¹

“Visibility into supply, demand, execution, and performance will help IT organizations decrease costs and increase revenue, using PPM process change management and PPM process automation as a foundation,” said Daniel Stang, Principal Research Analyst for Gartner, Inc. “Combining PPM and ALM support through process change and process automation is an important step toward significant, enhanced IT planning and control.”

Serena Mariner Ties IT to Business Strategy

Serena Mariner allows companies to manage IT as an investment portfolio by defining objectives, controlling risk, and efficiently balancing resource demands. With enterprise-wide visibility, projects are prioritized and assigned based on fit with business strategy.

By integrating PPM into a single ALM offering, Serena combines traditional PPM metrics, such as project costs and resource availability, with software development metrics, such as requirements met or defects open. This yields information that IT managers and executives can use to make better portfolio decisions and focus critical IT resources on higher-priority projects.

Serena Mariner 6.2 offers consolidated dashboard views of key project metrics via out-of-the-box integrations with both Serena TeamTrack, for real-time collaboration across the entire development ecosystem, and Serena Dimensions, which automates and manages the application development lifecycle from inception to implementation. IT decision makers and application development managers can monitor project progress without relying on manual roll-ups of project status information. As a result, IT executives can assess and manage all the elements critical to enterprise application development, including application demand, current project status, IT skills and resource availability, development costs, and fit between project progress and business requirements.

“We believe Serena has adopted the right business strategy with the integration of ALM and PPM,” said Dorene Farwick and Mary Beth Peavler, Systems Managers, Western & Southern Financial Group. “With better insight into project costs, resource availability, and application development, the new solution will give IT managers and executives the ability to make smarter, more informed decisions about how to allocate resources to address the most important business priorities.”

Benefits of Serena’s approach include:

• Focus application development resources on high-priority projects: IT decision makers and application development managers have visibility into all application development work — making it much easier to minimize the costs of maintenance work and assign the right resources to projects that deliver the most business value.
• Deliver projects on-time, on-budget and on-value: Complete visibility into the product lifecycle ensures that IT organizations can manage projects with an eye toward costs, timelines, and business requirements. Serena’s integrated PPM offering for ALM provides visibility into targeted requirements and met requirements throughout the entire project lifecycle — ensuring that IT delivers what the business needs.
• Ensure alignment between business and application development: The integration of PPM with ALM lets customers control not just the “what” and “how” but also the “why, when, and who” of IT project management. Data no longer has to be manually collected from disparate systems. Nor is it rolled up by hand and reported after the fact. Gathered from distributed sources and teams, data delivered to executives is both up-to-date and unfiltered for accurate status of projects and resources. The result is better decision-making, less rework, faster time-to-market, and final results that deliver expected project value.

Pricing and Availability

Serena Mariner 6.2 is available now worldwide. Easy to install and deploy, Mariner’s capabilities can be configured to an organization’s specific levels of IT process maturity. As IT organizations mature, more advanced Mariner capabilities can be enabled to drive additional value from their PPM and ALM initiatives. Serena offers free assessment services to help companies determine their IT process maturity.

Interested parties should contact their Serena sales representatives or authorized resellers. For more information, please visit http://www.serena.com/US/products/mariner.

About Serena Software, Inc.

Serena Software is the leader in Application Lifecycle Management for distributed and mainframe systems. More than 15,000 organizations around the world, including 96 of the Fortune 100, rely on Serena software to automate the application development process and effectively manage their IT portfolio. Serena is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and has offices throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific. For more information on Serena software and services, visit www.serena.com.

Serena, TeamTrack, and Dimensions are registered trademarks of Serena Software, Inc. Mariner is a trademark of Serena Software, Inc. All other products or company names are used for identification purposes only, and may be trademarks of their respective owners. Copyright © 2007 SERENA Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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